Welcome to the new Bob Ragan Library. During the course of my membership with the Georgia Triumph Association I came to meet a founding member of the club by the name of Bob Ragan. Now Bob was sort of ‘in retirement’ so to speak from the club when I met him but he was still an avid follower of the groups activities. Bob also was the club historian and as such, we found in each other ‘kindred spirits’. Having spoken with Bob on numerous occasions about the newsletter when I was the editor, Bob related to me that he had every issue of the newsletter back to when the club was first founded. Now I found this of great interest since I am a history buff and also, as the current President of the club, I was keenly interested in those that had gone before me and what things the club had done in the past. Another thing about me is that I am a Georgia transplant and I had no idea who any of these people are in the newsletters other than some I had met. To my surprise I have met many of these people who are no longer members, or have moved, but yet I have managed to run into them elsewhere. My shock when I learned that many of these people were former active members in the GTA, past presidents and board members. Wow, what a little history will teach you.

So with my love of history in mind I spoke with Bob and asked if he would be interested in having his vast store of newsletters preserved for posterity on this glorious thing we call the internet. Bob thought that was a wonderful idea, as did I, as it is something that can be passed on to future generations of the GTA membership. I also knew it would be a lot of work but so much of who we are is what we leave behind, so on December 6th 2014, Bob passed his store of past newsletters on to me that I might begin scanning these documents. On December 10th 2014 I began the project and while it is a work in progress, I am quite excited to be able to offer this resource to the GTA. Every pdf will be searchable to aid in finding what you may be looking for, or you can just do what I do and curl up with an iPad and take in the glories of yesteryear, many of you lived through it so I hope you enjoy a trip down memory lane. For the newcomers, take some time and get to know your club. If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. Indeed, you will find many recurring themes and valuable technical items in these tomes. With that I present to you the Bob Ragan Library.

-Tony Graham GTA President 2014 and Archivist

The Trumpet was published as a monthly newsletter for the members of the Georgia Triumph Association. Over time the content of the newsletter began to overlap with the function of the website which has now taken over the role previously assigned to the newsletter. The primary benefit of the new format is being able to search any and all content. No longer is information trapped in ‘data silos’ as individual newsletters. Why is that an issue? Well, if you wanted to know some technical information that was printed in a past newsletter, there is, using the former system, no way to look into that information to know the year or the issue, resulting in a time-consuming hunt. Think about magazines as a good analogy. Beautiful content, nice to hold and port around but ultimately ends up in a stack somewhere. If you look below you can see those stacks. Where is what you are looking for? I can’t tell you and neither can anyone else. In the internet age where information is available via simple searches this medium is no longer sufficient. It is possible that in the future these past issues will be converted into internet pages that can also be searched but this will take time and effort. As a tech tip you can search the entirety of gatriumph.com by putting in your search window site:gatriumph.com (whatever). So as a sample try: site:gatriumph.com Stag

Searches will also look inside all of the PDF newsletters since they have been scanned using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Isn’t it amazing that we have been able to take hard copy newsletters from 40+ years ago and make them entirely searchable and deliverable to the electronic device of your choice virtually for free? We might miss the tactile touch of paper, but there is no doubting we’ve come a long way with ease of use, availability and environmental stewardship.

With this information in mind, the paper copy of The Trumpet newsletter ceased publication in July of 2014. Members are still encouraged to submit articles, photographs or other materials of interest by emailing them to president@gatriumph.com. The editors reserve the right to alter content to suit the needs of the space allowed. Commercial advertising and sponsorships are still available via our website. The rates are unchanged and all ads run 24×7 and will be indexed by Google with the pages they appear on. Ultimately, potential market penetration is far greater than the previous newsletter option. Please contact treasurer@gatriumph.com for advertising inquiries.